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George continued. “He thought Silas would like it the best, but he didn’t. He freaked out and grabbed the bucket of blood your father had accidentally left in there—some hunter brought it with a deer carcass and Wilmot hadn’t dumped it yet. Silas threw the blood. Chaos. It was chaos, apparently. Wilmot told me that Silas found your knife in the museum and he … stabbed my boy.”

No, no, no! “No,” I said as tears flooded from my eyes now too.

“You left the knife in the museum,” George said.

“Not so someone would kill with it. I was just a kid, George. An oblivious kid.”

“So was my Johnny! He was a good kid.” Tears streamed down his cheeks even harder. Mine too.

Whose fault was it? It didn’t fucking matter, because it was horrible no matter how you looked at it.

I said, “Did you kill Wilmot?”

“No.”

I tried to understand what Wilmot would have done next. “My father brought Johnny’s body to you?”

“We buried him right over there.” Johnny nodded. “Wilmot said he’d never be found out here.”

“Why? Why didn’t someone call the police?”

“Because Silas was a kid too. Your father convinced me that the only way Silas might have a life was if we didn’t report him.”

“That wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“Silas’s life was horrible as it was. Wilmot didn’t want to make it worse. We buried Johnny. Your father gave me money, and I left town.”

“What happened to Wilmot?”

“I don’t know, Hazel. He was torn apart by all of it. None of it was easy for him either. I always thought he took his own life somewhere out here. I’ve looked for him over the years. If he was alive, I … well, I had to finish things here.”

Me too. “So, what is this? Vengeance? For leaving my knife out.”

“That, and if Wilmot is alive, he needs to know the kind of pain he put me through. Here at a place he loved, you will die too.”

I squinted at him, knowing I needed to run. But I needed to get up first. “You killed Silas. He was living on the streets of Tucson?”

“I did him a favor. His life had been pathetic ever since he’d killed my Johnny. He’d’ve been better off if the police arrested him.”

I could only imagine the scene inside my father’s studio, the place where I now worked. Blood, a stabbing. Death. Twenty-some years later, here we were. However, I found it hard to believe that George was going to be able to kill me. We were chatting. We’d become friends, kind of. We’d bonded over bones.

“Look at you, George. You don’t even look like the same man you were.”

“You were a part of my inspiration. I changed who I was so I could get away with what I needed to do.” The blade of a knife glimmered in his hand.

I needed him to put it down.

“I was just a kid, George,” I repeated. “We all were. Johnny didn’t deserve what happened to him. I’m sorry for all of it.”

George made a move to stand.

I tried to gather my bearings. I was going to need to run. George knew The Wild but not as well as I did.

He had the knife, though, and I was hurt. At least none of the bones in my legs were broken. I could still walk, maybe run. I was going to have no choice but to try.

An idea came to me like a laser to my brain.

I sucked in as deep a breath as my lungs could pull and let it out with the loudest scream or yell or whatever it was that I could muster.